A suspense novel, a political thriller, a novel of discovery—Little America opens in Boston today and tells the story of a man in search of the truth about his father’s past, a past locked away in the C.I.A.’s code of silence.

Terry Hooper’s father—Quaker-raised, Yale-educated, a sometime poet, now a retired (is he?) State Department veteran—was, in the 1950s, the C.I.A. station chief in Kurash, a small, newly constituted Middle Eastern country, a country caught in the grip of cold war politics, a country of beautiful and frightening Otherness (Arab women hidden behind their veils, scar-faced men on horseback with curved sabers, and streets that melted in the heat), 90 percent Muslim, lodged like a walnut between Syria and Iraq. Mack Hooper’s assignment: to win the confidence of the King of Kurash, an enigmatic, British-educated desert aristocrat to whom no one, not even the U.S. Ambassador, had been able to get close.

In a narrative that moves backward and forward in time, Terry puts together the pieces of the puzzle that has haunted him. Is his father a good man? Was he a friend to the young King, or a diplomat-seducer sent to betray him?What Terry unearths about the American intrigues in Kurash, about promises made, about monies delivered, about betrayal, about courage, about “us” and “them,” is brilliantly told in a novel that royally entertains while it evokes the conflict between private morality and public policy as it recaptures a time gone by, a time when Americans set out armed with “good intentions,” youthful desire for adventure, and the belief that they could save the world.

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From the Inside Flap:

enseful and atmospheric spy novel in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carr, Henry Bromell unfolds a labyrinthine tale of intrigue and moral ambiguity.

In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, CIA agent Mack Hooper arrived in the tiny middle-eastern kingdom of Kurash with a mission to befriend and protect its inexperienced young ruler. Now, forty years later, the country no longer exists and Mack’s son Terry is trying to piece together his father’s story. Was he a friend to the young king, or a diplomat-seducer sent to betray him? And what happened to the lost kingdom? Moving deftly between the feudal world of Kurash and the martini-washed enclaves of the American spies, Little America is a riveting and unexpectedly moving tale of honor and betrayal as well as a brilliant evocation of espionage in the darkest days of the Cold War.

From the Back Cover:

"LITTLE AMERICA does for the CIA what THE SOPRANOS does for the mafia--brings it home to the family, in a funny, real, and ultimately even more frightening and telling way."--Robin Green, Head Writer, Executive Producer, THE SOPRANOS